Friday, January 23, 2009

Bellingham Training Camp

Last weekend I participated in Recycled Cycles / Raleigh's annual Bellingham training camp. The weather was significantly better than last year, when snow cut Saturday's ride short. But the icy conditions this year did cause a bit of carnage.

Thanks to RT for hosting us and for driving the van and to Tyler Blake for organizing & cooking some great breakfasts and dinners.

Saturday's ride was relatively uneventful. We did 94 miles with a lot of rolling hills and a lot of flat ground ... much flatter than Whidbey, at least! It was great to have RT (and eventually Bianchi) in the team van to hand up water bottles and assist riders who flatted or had other mechanical issues. We only pushed the pace for two short stretches and basically rode as if we knew we were riding 100 miles the next day.

On Sunday "Hot Carl" Hulit and Adam "Turtle" Jablonski went down on an slick stretch of road and Turtle dislocated his shoulder. After the rest of the group got rolling again, we got split up near a small town called Everson after Rookie, Smoothie, Tyler Blake and I rolled off the front and chose a different route than the rest of the team. I felt strong on Day Two and was able to pull the train most of the way back to Bellingham. Tyler Blake and I took turns pulling the last few miles on the Mt Baker Highway and we held 26-28mph the whole way. The work that Matt has me doing on the trainer has really helped my efficiency, stability and durability on the bike. Woot!

A few of us had taken the day off work on Monday to squeeze in a third ride, but the roads were still slick at 10am and we decided that discretion was the better part of valor. So we packed up and drove back to Seattle and I did my Monday ride solo.

Matt Bianchi did a write-up of Day One on the Recycled Cycles / Raleigh team blog. He will probably add more pictures and commentary from Day Two.

Sally from Raleigh wrote an entertaining post about Sunday's ride on the Raleigh site.